Eclipse and Transit
by coincident
Summary: Most lovers live, some die, all do both, and one does neither. MadaItaShi/one-shot.


**A/N: **I've been working on this for a long while, but only just forced myself to finish it out of sheer self-loathing about that Ita/Shi crackfic. It's been harrowing to write, and I would appreciate feedback/therapy.

I was hoping to convey a little bit of the juxtaposition between ItaShi and MadaIta, and then I realized there was no better (?) way to do this than a triangle!fic. Misguided, perhaps--but I had noble intentions, I swear!

In other news, this is the first fic on FFN with this particular character tag. I'M SO PROUD.

**Warnings: **There's some lemony stuff going on, but nothing too traumatizing (I think). Also, Madara. Just...Madara. (And for the record, there's NO threesome. _Really._)

**AU Elements: **I tried so hard to make this canon-compliant, and then I forgot about Danzo and that craziness with Shisui's arm and Izanagi. But the rest of it, I think, jives.

**Disclaimer: **The opening quote is Rumi, who would no doubt be scandalized to see his poetry being used in such a fashion.

Enjoy...

* * *

_Next time I shall die_

_bringing forth wings and feathers like angels_

_after that, soaring higher than angels_

_-_

_what you cannot imagine_

_I shall be that._

**~X~**

Madara likes the sight of the two little Uchiha boys huddled together in one corner, a single mound of snapped limbs, greying skin over bones, webbed feet dusted with chalk—as if someone has flung a single diseased body against the canvas of the tent and split it in two on the floor. They are a haphazard tangle at odds with the merciless efficiency of their skin, which distorts and sucks itself inward towards the black holes inside their white bodies. He likes this because it reminds him of two other Uchiha boys who were once thrown against the wall this way by the same centrifuge of war, although they were teenagers at the time, and these boys are something like five, by the looks of it.

Still, history runs in motifs, not patterns, so this will suffice.

He watches them with only a perfunctory interest. They are too young to have any impact on anything. Water skimmers dance across the surface of star-studded lakes and leave nothing, not even a ripple to distort the reflection of things greater than themselves, but children do even less than this.

The medi-nin on duty, evidently, is of another opinion. "How long has it been since you've eaten properly?" she demands.

"Four months, three weeks, and two days," snaps the older one without pause, "and that's how long the fighting's been going on too. See the connection?"

He'll be a wit when he's older, because children like this are destined to be. At the moment, though, he is nothing of the kind—his legs are inward-bowed, his spine a death-rattle of bones and crimson scratches, and the weight of his bravado is a swollen and inglorious thing which bloats inside his chest and loses the fight to keep him standing. Starvation leeches everything from the skeleton: fat, muscle, blood, and also, it seems, aristocracy, because the only indication Madara has that this is his kin is the healthy red of the eyes.

Madara likes him. He looks like a glass ball shattered against the floor, with its load of crystal fragments and rainbow edges laid bare to the world, a gnawed-open ribcage. Bloodying and bleeding and too young for either: here is an _Uchiha_. Madara wraps the glitter of the invisibility jutsu closer around him and approaches, and then he sees the other boy, little more than a toddler, really, still collapsed against the wall and watching the older one with an unwavering gaze. He looks perfectly ordinary until the older one moves away, and then his eyes suddenly flicker with a world-ending horror, and his small hand moves out to grasp the other's shirt.

Madara sees immediately that war has already snapped this one in half. A boot in the middle of a baby's back, the simple _crack!_ that skews bone and fluid and nerves into unnatural angles, a spine laid in a broken jigsaw that looks the way the dissonant poetry of wartime sounds. Childhood, ravaged—life, reversed. A hackneyed process, and one that Madara observes with impatience and not a little exasperation.

The older boy doesn't have these reassurances, so he snaps and gesticulates at the medi-nin; something is there—scratches in the little one's arm, it appears, and concern over this kind of injury is so ridiculous in the midst of wartime that Madara actually chuckles. The healer swathes green chakra over the child's arm and the older boy leans over, and then Madara sees the latticework of slashes in his back. They are shallow sword cuts from the looks of it, deliberate and avoidable. Madara knows the look of these slashes. Shinobi assigned to bodyguard duty often sport wounds like these.

The situation rapidly becomes even more hackneyed, and highly disappointing.

"Good lord, child," gasps the healer. "Come here, and let me do you first—"

"_No_. Finish Itachi. I brought money and everything." Clink, clink—mismatched coins sealed into a small sweaty palm, because at six, nobody understands that the currency of war is forged in different metals.

This boy is no exception. He holds the coins out, and, biting her lip, the healer takes them.

**~X~**

There is nothing important about this memory, but eight years later, when the same boy drags himself out of the Nakano and yells, "Are you fucking _kidding me_?" to the world at large, it is all that crosses Madara's mind.

**~X~**

"I don't know who you are," shouts Uchiha Shisui, "but get the hell out of the bushes and let's have at it, if that's what you're here for. I'm really not in the mood for hide-and-seek. My best friend just tried to kill me, so you'll forgive me if I don't have the greatest associations with nostalgic childhood games right now."

Madara moves the brambles aside and comes out. Shisui wipes the water out of his eyes and narrows them at him, and Madara notes with approval that they are still a clear, undiluted red, testaments that Shisui's branch of the clan has been managing the bloodline with the requisite biological foresight. He considers complimenting him on this.

"What the fuck," says Itachi's closest friend. "Really? Itachi was okay with lettingsome obvious head case pop out of nowhere with a mask—_a mask, _mind you—and spy on us from the bushes? What is this?"

There is a hiss of pain from behind him, and Shisui whirls on his feet to stare at the supine figure at the water's edge. Itachi in his unconsciousness is tensed in agony. Blood leaks from under his eyelashes. Shisui curses and forms a few seals. Green chakra flows to his hands, and Madara siphons it away without thinking.

"What—" Shisui turns on him, all fifteen-year-old vitality and the sort of bonfire rage that makes funerary statistics of other shinobi. "I'm sorry, I'm trying to heal someone here? Do you mind?"

"His eyes are changing. You cannot heal it."

"Eyes…" Shisui's mouth becomes a thin line, then a dangerous one. "You mean this was—"

"For the Mangekyou, yes." Madara looks forward to this part of the conversation. Betrayal has such a fascinatingly opulent taste, like gold dust coating your tongue and smothering old words in luxurious rot. He remembers it gilding the Shodaime's hair, and glittering at the edges of Izuna's open mouth, and now here it is again, counterfeit ingots formed and reformed in Shisui's clenching fingers.

"Is that what it's called?"

Madara raises an eyebrow. "You have it yourself."

And indeed, Shisui does. His widened pupil takes the shape of three linked rings. He fingers his temples in a moment of self-consciousness, but quickly recovers and makes it look as if he were smoothing his hair back instead.

"Yeah," he says. "But I didn't know it was called that. Or that it was, you know, an…institution. I thought it was a mutation."

"It isn't. Who was it that died?"

"It—my sister. Shiori," says Shisui. "My caretaker, or whatever you call someone who puts food on the table and all that symbolic crap. Botched recon mission in Kiri."

"You knew it was caused by her death?" Madara is benevolently impressed.

"It happened the minute I learned, so it'd have to be some fucked-up kind of coincidence otherwise," says Shisui dismissively. This is not important to him. "And it makes sense, since the sharingan itself activates under stress. But that's not the point—I didn't die, so shouldn't his eyes stay the same?"

"He thinks you did. That is sufficient. I commend you on your jutsu."

Shisui's face loosens a little, like skin being flayed open, and he turns back to his unconscious friend. By this time he has settled Itachi awkwardly into his arms and is palming green chakra over the small wounds on his body in an absentminded fashion, as if he has done this several times before, and Madara realizes he probably has. The banalities of an old friendship are irritating to him, paradoxical; habits as deeply ingrained as marrow in the center of bone, and yet skin-skimming in their superficiality. Shisui handles Itachi without strangeness. His hands cup his friend's shoulders with perfect nonsexual precision, coaxing new skin over the wounds in his arms, alighting against his neck and wrists for a pulse point, smooth and coolly soothing as sheets of water.

"So just because we're having this conversation doesn't mean I'm okay with this bullshit," says Shisui without looking up. "I want to know who you are, and how you know about Itachi and my jutsu."

"Itachi informed me as to your ability," says Madara. "However, neither of us anticipated that you would actually use it against him. Apparently you—"

"Promised him that. Yeah." Shisui spits these words out quickly from between his teeth, a glittering predatory creature expelling the bones of its prey. "But I'm pretty sure this counted as an extenuating situation. And you know what—I'm actually not sure why I'm even talking to you. Who are you?"

Madara removes his mask and lets Shisui see the eternal Mangekyou and the pale face. Shisui is deputy chief of the police force by now and knows clan geneology well enough to place who he is—this is expected; he is Itachi's friend, and Itachi had recognized him immediately.

"Well," snarls Shisui. "Would you look at that. Our honored founder. So pleased to make your acquaintance, Madara-san, except for the fact that you and I should _both _be dead and I can't really bring myself to care about the logistics of your situation, but I do care about mine."

So Madara tells him. He explains Itachi's training and the mechanics of the Mangekyou, and when he arrives at the strategy for the massacre Shisui's expression turns incandescent with rage.

"For the love of god," he snaps. "Itachi can't possibly be this stupid. The 'entire clan'_ sounds_ great, but—what, he's going to off all our little cousins? Senior citizens? _Sasuke_?"

"You may discuss it with your Sandaime if you wish," says Madara smoothly. His interest is caught. Uchiha Shisui is a practical boy, clearly, with the economy of shinobi life a neat logarithm table in his mind, and it is difficult to reconcile this efficient soldier with the person Itachi described—a spy, the best of the Uchiha, the boy who would lead the coup. A boy who should have been the polar opposite of Uchiha Itachi, but somehow is not.

Then Madara sees the whirl of the Mangekyou in Shisui's eyes and thinks of a sister struck down under Kirigakure mist, leagues away but still not far enough to hold Shisui's body back from its ultimate biological transformation. Shisui must have loved her with the sort of desperation common to orphans, and the clan was always a bulwark for such children. Madara knows he would not have found the strength to stand against it.

But now, as he cradles Itachi's body in his arms, Shisui's loyalties rip and dangle off him, shredded ligaments, stripped from bone and discharging their load of sour lifeblood onto the grass of the riverbank. The white of his skin is the white of cartilage when flesh is cut away. He seals his arms around Itachi, apologizing, it seems, for whatever distance has sprung between them in the last few days. His contrition is a skeletal thing, sternum and spinal column inward bowed to change his posture as he tucks his cheek into Itachi's hair; and Madara has seen broader backs than this bent into this celestial bowmans-curve, but surely it means something else here.

In this change of angles the mathematics of Uchiha Shisui's life is laid bare. His ribs crack open one after another like the petals of a deconstructing flower, so exposed that Madara can reach into the cavity and touch the red heart that lies there, if he wants. The best of the Uchiha, indeed, but ultimately a simple boy with a friend.

"You will not thwart his plans," Madara says. Any trace of aggressiveness is bleached from the words; they are a simple statement of facts, and Shisui, a boy who grew up in a war—and hence won it as its perpetuators could never have done, as Madara knows all too well—nods his assent.

"Fucking Itachi," says Shisui, his voice pitched low enough that he cannot possibly be crying. "Fucking Itachi and his fucking savior complex and fucking martyric tendencies and—"

"Are you going to help him?"

Shisui closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they are dark. Madara is surprised; he expected pure and obscure Uchiha irises, given the carmine vigor of Shisui's sharingan, but Shisui's eyes are actually a warm sepia color that is utterly unlike that of any Uchiha eyes he has ever seen.

"I can't," says Shisui. "He thinks he killed me. That's how the jutsu works."

"Dispel it, then."

"You don't understand. It's not a genjutsu, it's a _mind technique_. I've told his mind to make him believe I'm not alive, and now even if he's confronted with evidence that I still am, his mind's going to make up stuff to confirm what I told him. That's why the technique's so effective—it urges your own mind to feed you something, and then you just…_think_ it. You can't dispel it. It lasts forever."

His voice cracks on 'forever,' as if it's a phrase he's memorized and rehearsed and can't bring himself to use out of context.

"Then you will have to leave," says Madara. "I will leave you alive, for now."

"Is that so? I'm not a threat?"

Madara knows that saying the truth would be cruel, especially when he can feel the torn-away heart still beating imploringly against his palms, but cruelty seen from two hundred years away is very little, just a grudge that burns inside his lungs as white-hot and acrid as smoke from a star. Shisui would be better for such a grudge to hold inside his bones, he thinks.

"After he is gone," he says, turning a palm towards Itachi, "what will you have left?"

And the anger flares into life, so blinding and beautiful inside Shisui's adolescent frame that Madara wants to open himself up and warm his skin in its flames. This is anger so different from Itachi's quiet hopeless feeling for Sasuke—this is an anger that crackles like hair in a fire, the conflagration and rage of a seven-year-old standing upright in front of his best friend.

"I'll go," says Uchiha Shisui, "but I won't leave."

**~X~**

Shisui refuses to take part in the massacre until he realizes that Madara is capable of simply doing it himself in the absence of his cooperation.

At that point, it is revealed that he possesses a consummate skill at slaying his kinsmen. He perches in a tree and spreads his jutsu out in a threadbare blanket over his wing of the complex, and one by one brothers turn against one another and cut themselves down like strands of wheat under the harvest moon.

"I could tell them anything," he tells Madara. "I already told them they found my body in the river. I could tell them they're already dead. But I won't."

_Because they deserve it_, adds the set of his jaw and shoulders—and in the mind of a fifteen-year-old who has been torn away from his best friend by these amateur politicians, perhaps they do. Madara was fifteen once as well. Justice was nothing more than a manifestation of who deserved what, and at the time, with his body as balanced and exact as a set of scales, it had seemed elementary that he be the one to dispense it.

Shisui and Itachi make a neat set of bookends holding these volumes of carnage upright. At the other end of the compound Itachi is scything through his portion of the district with the same precision—it is so obvious they have been trained together, simply by the way they tie on shuriken holsters and wrap their kunai and wipe blood out of their eyes. Madara sees for the first time how Shisui's technique works when Itachi comes to report to him and says, "It is done," and although Shisui is standing right behind him, Itachi's eyes do not meet his at all.

"Do you see what I mean?" asks Shisui. He walks in front of Itachi and stops there. Itachi does not react to his presence.

"He does not even see you," muses Madara, too quietly for Itachi to hear. "If you cannot reverse it, can you not cast it again over it?"

Shisui shakes his head. "That's like painting over a picture," he says. "I'm not good enough yet. Someday, maybe."

He does not go to see what Itachi does to Sasuke, but Shisui does. He is the one to tell him. Like a current underneath their conversation is Itachi's breathing in sleep, head pillowed on a bloody breastplate he hasn't had time to clean, his body curled into an aborted foetus.

"It's like he's _trying_ to be some kind of maudlin tragic figure," Shisui rants. "This is ridiculous. If Sasuke ever finds about this, it _will _send him off the deep end, I'm not even kidding."

Still, that night, Shisui curls into the hollows of Itachi's body and fists his fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, and Madara can see the moon vibrant off their twin white foreheads. Itachi's is furrowed slightly as he dreams. Shisui closes his eyes. Madara sees his thumbs come up and describe two gentle fans on Itachi's cheeks, as if dabbing away tears that do not exist yet, although this is a paroxysm of sentimentality that has probably not crossed Shisui's mind at all. The gesture is too intrinsic, something beyond conscious thought and formed of something as organic as the grass underneath them and the sky above them.

"Your closest friend, huh?" he mutters. "You're an _idiot_."

In the morning Uchiha Shisui is gone, but Madara remembers the bending of his spine, and knows he will not go very far at all for fear that it will snap.

**~X~**

Madara sees to it that Itachi is placed under the care of Hoshigaki Kisame, although Itachi would resent the implication that he is to be placed under the care of anyone. Itachi, a self-styled pillar of Konoha, does not feel that he requires maintenance in order to survive, inexperienced as he is in the flimsy architecture of human beings.

Kisame and Itachi get along very well, which is to say that they eat quietly and go to sleep quietly and don't create idiotic complications out of their non-relationship as others in the Akatsuki have done. Itachi at fourteen is beautiful in an inexcusable, poisonous way, but Kisame is a seasoned shinobi and sidesteps his attraction out of sheer respect. Madara is pleased by this. Contact with a new person would grind away at what Itachi is already becoming, and Madara cannot afford this.

The everpresent specter of Sasuke, as it were, is bad enough.

For his part, Madara fucks the longing out of Itachi's body as if this will be enough to purge the ideological fervor that is already rising like a tide inside the boy's mind. This is a bad idea no matter how it is considered. But he knows that it is better him than Kisame, who has an honor code that pools in the smooth blue hollows of his throat and the muscles of his chest and creates a distraction for Itachi, who is, in this, a very ordinary teenager.

The first time, his curious eyes flutter closed as Madara slips a hand under his too-large cloak, and then that night he leaves Kisame in their hotel room and comes to Madara and looks at him, simply, articulately, his desire a third person taking up space and air in the miserable little room. Itachi has always been a direct boy. He is predictable, in spite of his apathetic veneer.

So Madara lays him out and engraves the old legends into Itachi's flesh, tastes himself and his youth disintegrating into gray dust on that fine white skin, but these things are escapable in the thrill of sensation that follows. Itachi's hips are still small and narrow and the round ring of bites looks wrong on them, too adult, as does his wince when Madara shows him how to move against him. Itachi closes his eyes and catches his breath in his throat, all his muscles slipping and straining into Madara's body, and then his mouth opens and the pink flare of his tongue flickers, the poetry of his climax flowing forth in a language older than his own.

In the middle of the night, Madara awakens to the boy's expressionless voice saying, "Shisui, Shisui" over and over again, a constant heartblood rhythm that mocks the broken tempo of their bodies.

**~X~**

He doesn't tell Shisui this when he next appears, which is ten days after the incident occurs.

Shisui seems to have been in Amegakure. He is wearing their standard-issue half-yukata and the Ame hitai-ate cocked over his curls, complete with its defiant slash through the middle. The missing-nin mark suits him as the Uchiha symbol on his shirt did not.

Madara compliments him on this before broaching the subject of killing Itachi. This has been on his mind recently, although he expects nothing to come of it. Shisui fixates on the compliment and interprets it incorrectly (or correctly, perhaps), with the typical oversexed bravado of a teenager who knows his own attractiveness.

"You are such a cradle-robbing creep," Shisui dismisses, carelessly youngly overconfidently tragically _ignorant_ of how true this is. "I'm _sixteen_. And if you're really two hundred years old, you should know that the promise of fratricide and after-dinner fucking in the same hour isn't much of a pickup line."

Madara honestly has no idea how to respond to this, so he waits silently. Shisui snorts and pulls the Ame hitai-ate off his hair, which sticks up awkwardly in the damp patches left behind.

"I'm not going to kill Itachi. But I'm pretty sure you already knew that."

He does. It is the last time the subject is broached between them.

"You've been in Ame?"

"Just for a while," says Shisui. "I did drop in on Konoha, though."

"Why?"

There is nothing left for Uchiha Shisui in Konoha anymore. Still, he has accomplished something. Shisui smiles a mirthless smile and tells him what.

Shimura Danzo has been identified as the engineer of the massacre, although Madara finds this a narrow-minded view that fails to take in every piece on the chessboard. Itachi, with sanctity and martyrdom thrumming in every nerve of his body, is hardly a pawn, and the Sandaime displayed a lack of foresight so grave Madara cannot help but consider it a crime. Madara sees all this.

But Shisui is a sixteen-year-old with a best friend and every pore of his skin glistens with _justice, justice_, which is why he felt the need to return to Konoha and cast one last jutsu over its most dangerous inhabitant.

"He thinks he's got one of my eyes," Shisui explains.

"Anyone would realize he hasn't."

"No, no—listen to this, he's been _robbing grave_s_. _He's implanted like, six sharingan into his arm. I…convinced him to stick one into his eye, too, like Kakashi-senpai, except he's paranoid and stupid and covered the entire thing in bandages so no one can see it."

"And what is the purpose of this?"

"The purpose, Madara—" Shisui has discarded the suffix by now, ceasing to pretend that he is anyone worth honoring in his life—"is that one day he'll _really need _to use my technique, and he'll think he's doing it, too, but he won't be able to. And then he'll die."

"Very well, but if he meets a Hyuuga who can read the colors of chakra, he will—"

"I took care of that." Shisui waves his hand, a little flicker of capable fingers. "It's like hypnosis. If any of the byakugan users—or someone who _steals _one, for that matter—comes face to face with him, he'll think it's my eye too. Secret's safe."

Madara finds himself impressed again, not a smooth chocolate rush of pride, as with Itachi, but something he has to set his jaw against, as he once did facing the Shodai Hokage. "One jutsu over the entire Hyuuga compound? In one night?"

"Sure. The day after I got Danzo, because I can only do it once a day. You forget, I'm also fast." A sideways smirk, there and gone before he realizes it. Shunshin no Shisui indeed.

Vengeance in humiliation, the oldest mode of youth—but this has not diminished the white flare Madara remembers of the boy, the fire that hums under Shisui's skin and pulls him back to where he needs to be with all the colossal gravity of a planet orbiting its sun. Even as they speak Shisui's eyes flicker about the room, searching, searching, and Madara knows for what.

"He is not here."

"Oh—yeah. Yeah, I knew that."

"He and Kisame are in Kirigakure on a mission."

"Really?" says Shisui. "Well. I've always wanted to go to Kiri."

**~X~**

For the first time in years, he turns his attention to one of his descendants who is not Itachi.

Shisui's story is less glamorous; this is for certain. There are cheap rooms, wretched dinners cobbled together with rancid meats and greying vegetables, and one night on the road Shisui simply vomits up the contents of his stomach and collapses, sick with misery at his own incompetence. Madara checks him into an inn and leaves him there, to thrash his way through the stages of fever as he supposedly slipped through the stages of drowning. He recovers and finds himself broke, facing an irate landlady, with no knowledge of how he arrived at the present position—but Shisui turns out to be an old hand at improvisation; he uses the shunshin for odd jobs—chopping firewood, fetching water, amateur carpentry—and somehow, leaving a trail of his blood along the winding road, manages to earn himself to Kiri.

The mist has settled in for the rainy season and Kirigakure is a shroud. Things are safe here in their deadness. Madara has not returned since his stint as Mizukage, and he observes the changes with the patience of silt as quicksilver water runs past it, because he knows that there is enough of the old Kiri in its inhabitants to give pause to the new Mizukage in his gory reforms. Meanwhile, the bloodline clans die, in great endless spirals. The Uchiha massacre is nothing here.

Still, Shisui keeps his sharingan deactivated and the Konoha hitai-ate stowed away in his pocket. He's cheerful and jaunty, shooting salutes at others he meets on the road and bowing respectfully whenever he encounters shinobi or nobles, but Madara does not neglect the way his sight flies through the trees, a flock of birds touched by dying sun and pinwheeling away before the light can color more than the edges of their wings. His gaze soars above everything, incisive and burning as Madara remembers, and perhaps it is the immense force of his longing, or perhaps simply the dropped dice of fate, but one rainy day he finds what he is looking for.

Kisame says, "Who's that? Looks Uchiha, Itachi-san," and in the lock of gazes touching—nothing sensual, just sight on sight, a strangely clean electricity—Shisui's desire is enough to stop the world on its axis. Cool, architectural lines of rotation draw white diagrams in the air around the two boys—here a place where paths can cross, there a swathe of distance capped in light-years—and Shisui's star moves forward in its descent, bleeding fire and sun-stone from its weeping core.

"There is no one there, Kisame," says Itachi.

Madara watches Kisame cock his head in concern—Itachi can check these things more thoroughly than he can, so there is no risk of genjutsu—but he is a Kirigakure native, and knows better than anyone the watery ghosts that lie in the lay of this land. So he shrugs, shoulders his sword.

"All right," he says, and as they leave, Uchiha Shisui balls his hands into fists.

**~X~**

"I don't know what you intended to accomplish," says Madara. "You knew how it would be."

Shisui makes a rude gesture at him. Rain plasters his curls to his forehead. It is only now that he appears to be drowning, long lashes pregnant with luscious drops of rain, the curve and the swell mirroring the cool arches of his cheeks. Madara wants to drown him in the deluge—push him into one of the overflowing lakes that blankets Kiri's landscape, coat his body in silver water, reforge in floods and droplets the glass curvature of his skeleton. But he simply watches him instead, because the last prodigy of the Uchiha clan is no prodigy at this caught moment in time, simply—something else, something that Madara has never examined very clearly. The vision keeps slipping away, like a reflection spilled over gossamer water and then snatched out of reach by waves rippling with moonlight, individual stars all lost somewhere in the glare.

That night Shisui kisses him—like Itachi, he is vicious, all poisonous bites and sweetly venomous skin tented over the sculpture of his muscles. There is nothing sentimental about the way he peels layers from Madara's bones—words, clothes, perhaps skin—or the way he hisses _your fault_, _you made him do it_, but Madara lets this go on because of how untrue he knows it to be. Blame absolves Shisui in swift, scalping strokes, sloughing off his skin, ripping the black wash of hair from his head, leaving him free to think what he wishes of Itachi as the red blood glitters in the hollows of his throat. He traces choking words in wet, hot trails over Madara's skin.

_Itachi isn't_—

—_your fault—_

_I could have saved him—_

But Madara knows this is all wishful thinking of the sort that Shisui will not allow himself to entertain in the morning. The boy's vivid red eyes flay him skin from flesh, whirl accusingly with every movement he makes; they brand their pinprick accusations into the malicious semicircle of bites Shisui leaves across his hip, as he himself left across Itachi's.

"You're too young to do this in this way," he says when Shisui pins his shoulders, kiss-bitten mouth all wet and skewed in a snarl. His lips are small and thin, already as firm as a man's. Madara draws him down, bites kisses into his angry remonitions, soaks himself in Shisui's rage and frustration as if acid leaks from the sheets they crush beneath them. Shisui's nails trace red across the universe, or the smooth planes of it contained in the expanse of Madara's chest. When Madara reaches up to curl his fingers around the boy's thighs, Shisui snaps _no_ into the curve of his collarbones and traps his legs, waiting for the struggle that he will not provide.

"It doesn't seem that your experience thus far has been consensual," he says languidly, pauses breathed between the bloody kisses across Shisui's jugular. "Disgraceful in its implications, Shisui-kun."

"Fuck you," says Shisui, and sinks his teeth into Madara's shoulder. There should be discomfort, but instead Madara enjoys the boy's colt-like vitality, the vigor visible in the parts of his body he can see—brutal, bird-clawed fingers, the sensuous shimmer of sweat across his back when he dips his head, the wrinkles that spread from his shut eyes as he wrenches them tighter, more tightly closed than he can stand.

Once, Shisui says, "I wanted—"

What he wanted is obvious, but it is lost, because Madara drives himself up, up into him, and there are no words after that.

**~X~**

It is strange to envision Itachi as the recipient of that youthful energy, particularly when he draws aside his hair and leans over a book or a scroll, turning pages with his sharp little mouth pursed in concentration. Everything about Itachi is a cruel seriousness now. Madara hasn't seen him smile in weeks—and then months—and then two years; he is sixteen, as Shisui was (almost) when he supposedly died.

Itachi makes a little offering at a shrine on the anniversary of the death. His hair lifts like a banner in the wind and whirls its strands, a little windmill, all unfettered gaiety and the promise of things created. The terse rice cake in his hands is an anchor in the view; he is a black-coated feather against an entire explosion of blue sky, and the little center of white in his hand is as painful to look at as the core of the sun.

Madara says, "Hurry," and Itachi places it on the altar. He bows. The gesture makes Madara uncomfortable, although it is routine, and throngs of civilians mirror it around Itachi's bent form, but it still turns itself over in his memory and throbs at the edges, hurting his eyes.

Later he realizes it is the immortality implicit in the act which threatens him, for as long as that bowed curve of the spine can still find its arch in Itachi's bones—a riverbank, and a shrine, are they so different?—Uchiha Shisui will continue to exist, effortless and undammed as the spin of Itachi's hair in the breeze.

Shisui, for his part, hares across countries to pluck the rice cake from its place at the altar and turn it over and over in his hands. It is his first link of communication with Itachi in years. Madara wants to say something cloying and sentimental and so true that it shatters the mood, draws that gorgeous thundercloud back over Shisui's face, but the boy does it for him.

"Did he say anything?" he asks.

Such foolishness. Madara laughs.

Shisui wraps up the little rice cake and tucks it into his satchel. It's been Suna this time. Sand glitters in his hair and washes his skin a cool gold, collecting in the crevices of his boots and the traveling cloak he's taken to wearing. Wrapped in the smug persona of a traveler he is something of a romantic figure—eighteen, not at all the sick boy trailing his best friend to another village—but his lips are still thin, eyes still hooded, and Madara knows that he is ever the same.

"You're still waiting for him to say something?"

"I'm not waiting for anything."

It's true. He shoulders his satchel and is gone like a golden sandstorm in the morning, the flicker of his jutsu bearing him away across the world again—fast, quicksilver fast, but not fast enough to escape.

**~X~**

One morning Itachi coughs up blood.

Kisame leaves to scour the next town for medicines, ignoring his partner's stony glares. The next week Madara brings what he has to their current hideout in a small newspaper package. Itachi is sitting on the bed and reading. He spares his teacher nothing more than a cursory glance.

"These herbs are from all over the world," he says when he opens the packet of medicines. He narrows his eyes at a vial from Kirigakure, a distillation of a rare water plant, and sets it aside. There are some powders from Konoha itself and a rare Amegakure vitamin infusion. All sorts of medicines, glittering in their bottles and stoppers like the levers of some giant glass piano.

"If he doesn't take them properly, you'd better do something about it," glowers Shisui, who has been loitering outside the village for days and by the looks of it, subsisting on pilfered soldier pills and his own bitten nails. "He needs this, okay? I made a few pretty questionable deals to pay for that wormwood infusion, and I'm pretty sure the Amegakure medical community's going to make me pay in equivalent volumes of my _blood_."

Madara assures him that he will make sure Itachi takes the medicine. And indeed, Shisui has left meticulous instructions, copied carefully in some arbitrary person's handwriting to disguise his own. Itachi believes Madara has done this for whatever reason, so he says nothing.

"They have proven most effective," says Madara. "How did you know?"

It is only then that he discovers a twin set of medicines in Shisui's own satchel, and when the boy next spends the night, the hacking cough that leaves flowers of red on the bedroom sheets and mirrors Itachi in that same bookend symmetry Madara has come to associate with the two of them.

"I think it's genetic," says Shisui. "We probably exacerbated it, traveling around like we do. Whatever. I'm not going anywhere."

But one day Sasori, who has enough Sunagakure medical training to run preliminary tests on Itachi, pronounces the tuberculosis advanced to a further stage. Shisui exhausts his chakra traveling to the Fire Country for Itachi's favorite tea, and when he returns he is so tired he mistakenly labels it in his own handwriting.

When Madara hands it to him, Itachi's fingers freeze on the little packet.

"Where did you learn this handwriting?" he asks in his low voice.

"It's Shisui's," says Madara. "He is alive."

And Itachi—who has never voluntarily resorted to contact fighting in the ten years of their acquaintance, never lost his control enough to touch another person in a battle—sets the packet of tea aside, and hits Madara in the jaw.

**~X~**

Itachi sees Sasuke again for the first time since the massacre. Shisui wonders if he should unveil himself to the youngest Uchiha.

"It would be unwise," says Madara. "Sasuke is not stable."

Shisui laughs. His laugh has taken on a deep, throaty quality, as if he has been drinking—Madara wonders if this assessment is, in fact, correct, although this would be certain suicide, considering the illness. It is clear that Shisui sees his role as some sort of heroic mercenary, sweeping into countries and out of them and performing favors in exchange for lodging and food and occasional medical care.

"Sasuke was _never _stable," says Shisui. He is contemptuously jovial to Madara until the nights, when his anger flares, and Madara likes him most at these times, as he carves entire ravines of scars into the tender earth. At times like these—impaled upon Shisui's flesh, skin shriveling in the furious venom of his sweat—he wonders if he took on the wrong protégé.

Yet, there is still that symmetry in pinning Itachi's wrists to silken sheets. The younger boy's tendons are as apathetic under his fingers as if Madara is doing nothing more than teaching him a new technique (and this is what it is, with Itachi, this is all it ever is). Madara wonders if the boy has any conception of what the act should really entail.

But when he wonders this, he thinks of a moment washed out by early Konoha sun—

**~X~**

—and in the pale gold of memory, Shisui's mouth on Itachi's is as soft as the juice of the sunrise around them. Fingers just skirting the edges of dark hair, the sort of shattering tenderness that hums only in the limbs of the young and the lovelorn; he is both, Uchiha Shisui, but the clamor of his existence is silent here. His elbows support his weight, not an inch of his body pressing against Itachi's to crush away his breath, but contained within himself and held apart with all the control of his shinobi nerves. Their lips are the only point of contact between them. Shisui's curved back presents a question mark, but the kiss, Madara knows, is nothing so much as an answer.

And although Itachi is eighteen at this point, sleeping dreamlessly with a double-wrapped kunai under his bedroll, scars across his chest from Madara's bites and the unavoidable turning of the world, Madara understands that this is his first kiss.

One last taste of Itachi's mouth, a gilded stroke of nectar, and Shisui pushes himself to his feet.

Nothing is said. Madara expects Shisui's eyes to hurt him like torn-out holes in a paper screen, but when he raises them, there is nothing in them but that odd sepia color, simmering with content. He looks at Itachi for a long time. The morning grows sharper, bleeds color back into the world, but that unknown riverbank is touched with fantasy.

In the end, as he always does, Shisui leaves, and in the flurry of wind that follows the shunshin, Itachi places his fingers to his lips and wakes up.

**~X~**

Love, he has always thought, is not a triumph.

But then, this is something he thought he had learned years ago, as his enemy's love made a village of a ragtag group of clans and drew the heartblood from an eighteen-year-old with wild hair. There was talk of love, then, but in reality there was only an endless storm. There was a night that looked poured over the world, and there were moments that stung like arrows in his body, but there was no trace of what he had seen in Shisui's face that day at the riverbank.

If that is love, there was none of it then.

Perhaps this is what makes him activate his own sharingan one day and lock eyes with Shisui as the boy twists above him, the angles of tension muddled breakable lines in the smooth asymptotes of his skin. Shisui looks questioning for a moment, and then as the look of horror cracks across on his face, he says, "Madara, don't—"

But it's too late, the Tsukuyomi has him, and within his illusion Madara recreates the white expanses of skin he knows so well, Itachi's impersonal limbs replacing his own under Shisui's thighs. He manuevers those efficient fingers up, lets them trace cool trails across Shisui's cheek, and his descendant says, "No—_no_—" even as his breath turns to a rattlesnake hiss in his throat. Even within the genjutsu, there is no need to exaggerate Itachi's beauty—he has always been mercilessly lovely without being feminine. Beautifully paradoxical, with that apathetic starkness threaded into the lace of his eyelashes. And Shisui swallows, grows paler—

"—please—"

It's the first time Madara has heard something like this from Shisui's mouth. He smiles. In the Tsukuyomi, Itachi's heartless lips echo the smooth bowman's curve, like the bending of a spine, snap, snap, snap.

"Stop it—"

But bodies, as Madara knows, are things of this earth. The body does not hear prayer, even if Shisui believes himself a star in the sky, wheeling about Itachi's answering one in an eternal binary dance. This is no way to live a life. And in fact, it hasn't been—all three of them have slept with corpses, as he knows now—and in their moments of contact, that mainstay of a shinobi life, this has been at once the most dishonest and honest of the things they have done. Above them, infinite stars die in the vastness of space, and below them, Shisui's eyes screw helplessly shut as Madara sends his last fantasy up in flame.

**~X~**

"You will think of it," he tells him in the morning, as Shisui ties on one of the many hitai-ate he has acquired—this one an Iwa one, startlingly clean, for what Shisui does leaves no blood.

Shisui glances at him. There is nothing in the glance. Madara's clean eyesight fails to imbue it with any meaning whatsoever.

"If that makes you feel better," Itachi's best friend says finally, "go ahead and think that."

"There is no sense in loving someone like Itachi. What he sees is greater than you can imagine."

Shisui opens the door of the motel room and floods it with early sunlight, cotton-soft and awash in the sensory reminiscence of a kiss on a riverbank. It is an illusion, all nonsense. No more real than Itachi in the Tsukuyomi was. Yet there is no way to break this one, that he can see, and this makes all the difference.

"Someone like Itachi is the only kind of person I want to love," says Shisui.

"Why?"

"Because he loves the rest of the world, in his own fucked up way. Even if you can't see that. It's what he'll get you with someday."

"So?"

"So I'm his best friend. He'll just burn himself out on love for everything else—even _you _understand that crazy martyr mentality of his—if no one's around to love _him_."

"He won't know that."

Shisui actually laughs.

"You think that matters?"

No, Madara knows. For this is what Shisui has proven in his flicker of a life: nothing matters, not homelessness, not enemies, not cold, not hurt, not the illness that is eating them both to the bone—because there is something that matters above all over these, something that simmers in the apocalyptic haze of starlight—whatever it is that colors the edges of Shisui's hair silver in the nights and leaves Madara's mouth afire with the sun-sweet tattoo of a kiss. There is something, but it has been years, and he can no longer remember its name. And nothing matters, but this does.

This does.

**~X~**

It is snowing in Kumogakure when the Kirin roars into life. Madara sees Sasuke's lightning rend the sky from its moorings. The catastrophe draws Itachi's breath forth in a silver rope of steam, sets the Susano'o burning over the forests of the fire country. A storm splits its heavy belly on the brothers and spills its rain in heavy entrails: chunks and ropes of wetness thudding to the landscape and coating it in the thick scent of copper—blood, slaughter, Madara can smell it in the air, and he knows Itachi's time has come.

But it is snowing in Kumogakure.

Madara flickers into corporeality for only a moment, but it is enough for Shisui's eyes to widen in surprise. His eyelashes are all dotted with snowflakes. He is twenty-three, no longer a boy, and the crest of white snow in his hair looks as natural as if his last curls of hair have been bleached silver. In one glance Madara can tell why he hasn't seen him for months; his skin is so white it is nearly transparent, and his hands, shaking too hard to form seals, have surely not been able to ferry him across countries for some time now. His time, too, is at hand.

"Hey," he greets anyway, a flare of his old vitality burning like an ember in the coals. "What—"

"He is dying," says Madara. "Go."

**~X~**

The shunshin can make a person travel faster than sound, or so it is said. Shisui flickers in and out of the world, stopping only momentarily to calm his trembling limbs—feet braced for a moment on a mountaintop, or splashing briefly in some unseen river—before he is lost again in the slipstream of time that carries him to Itachi's side.

Faster than sound, but as Madara watches him from the spaces between dimensions, he hears him before he sees him—

—"Wait for me, _wait for me_—"

—Here is a boy in the war again, gesturing to his tiny cousin as the younger boy begs him not to go—

"—I'm coming—"

—a classmate, tossing a reassurance to his best friend as he waits at the gate to walk to class—

"—don't you die on me, you little fuck, _don't_—"

—a cousin, casting sharingan eyes away from his teammates to scout for a younger boy in a shared chuunin exam—

—"Itachi—"

—just Uchiha Shisui, a silver-blue flash across oceans and rivers and lakes and universes, the binary star in its orbit unwilling to spend its dying days in the darkness of an eclipse. The velocity shakes the fever loose inside his ribcage and it gnaws away his strength like a beast; his eyes grow ever darker inside their grey sockets, there is no chakra left for his sharingan—

—"_Itachi_—"

The body does not hear prayers.

**~X~**

They die a few miles apart, curled into twin foetal positions like two halves of an S.

Madara teleports away from his conversation with the eight-man squad and goes to Shisui first. His hands are still tense and bird-clawed, as if he dropped in the middle of making his last seal. He was commendably close. Perhaps two more shunshin jumps, perhaps three—it is futile to count them now; they are lost in the mathematical chambers of the sky, with its infinite load of stars.

He sets Shisui's body ablaze with a single katon. Even in death the boy's bones are stubborn; it takes an Amaterasu to banish him to the next life, in the end. At Madara's hands he receives a Viking funeral. The water of the Nakano began his death and fire sealed it, two elements enclosing his life in their totality. As the embers spiral up towards heaven, Madara overlays his vision with genjutsu until the little orange sparks are silver, the color of metal, the color of water. The color of starlight.

Miles to the north, Itachi's face is relaxed in a smile, as if whatever jutsu he was bound into in life has been broken--and at long last, his vision has cleared.

**~X~**

_end_


End file.
